Pacific Islanders dance to protest global warming

Judy MitomaDancers from Kiribati will be featured in "Water Is Rising"

NEW YORK—Missionaries brought Christianity to Tuvalu in 1865. More recently, inhabitants of this Pacific island chain were given a new reason to pray.

Far from their coral reefs, the technology that supports the comforts of a modern lifestyle has run amok. It is changing the earth’s climate, and consequently rising seas are swamping Tuvalu and other low-lying islands. The islanders, who eke out their living from a delicate ecosystem based on porous sand, may have nowhere to turn but God when encroaching salt water poisons their taro plants and floods their homes.

First, however, they are turning to us. In “Water Is Rising,” which will be performed at the Skirball Center on Sunday, performers from Tuvalu and the similarly endangered nations of Tokelau and Kiribati will share a program of dances and songs making their case for survival.

Water Is RisingWhere: Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, LaGuardia Place and Washington Square South, New YorkWhen: Sunday at 2 p.m.How much: $25 to $40; call (212) 352-3101 or visit skirballcenter.nyu.edu.

“Water Is Rising” is spearheaded by Judy Mitoma, director of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. A dance ethnographer, she has studied the Pacific for more than 30 years, and notes that the isolated coral atolls have a cultural “coherence” that has vanished elsewhere.

“You will be hard-pressed to find the kind of dancing you see from Kiribati in the Marshall Islands,” Mitoma says. “Why? Because the Marshall Islands have been much more absorbed into a Western lifestyle.”

The coral atolls are so poor in natural resources that they were of little interest to 19th-century European colonizers. The tourist industry mostly has gone sailing by. Yet the atolls are home to cultures thousands of years old.

“You cannot pick up and move a culture. If they’re dispersed across the planet, then they’re going to lose what they have.”

Describing some of the dances, Mitoma says: “The Tuvalu group has a gentle and loving style. Tokelau features more of the strong, male warrior dancing style, and Kiribati has very tight and synchronized ensemble movement. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

The music, she says, displays Western influences. The islanders have mastered multi-part church harmonies, and have adopted the guitar.

“Poetry is key to all,” she says, explaining why she chose to translate the songs with super-titles.

She adds, however, that “the melody, the rhythm, the gestures and the words combine to create a whole.”

Mitoma says that Tuvalu captured the world’s attention for the first time when its delegates made an impassioned plea at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009. Yet she insists that “we’re not hitting people over the head with a political statement.”

For these islanders, climate change is an established fact. “With each high tide, water is intruding into the land more and more,” Mitoma says. “If there is no rain, they cannot drink. If the water surge ruins their crops, there is no vegetable, there are no plants.

“Their faith is such that, when all is said and done, they trust God will provide.”

In the meantime, the islanders had better hope they’re praying in a language the developed world understands.